Course setup

Getting the course content

Download the course content from this link, and then move the file to wherever you’d like to put the courses contents, and extract it.

Installing packages

For the course

With pip (simplest)

Navigate to the directory you just extracted, and run

pip install -r requirements.txt

If you get an error message saying that pip is not installed, or something similar, then try:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

or, if that fails too, replacing python with either python3 or py.

With conda

Again, navigate to the course directory, and run either:

conda install -f environment.yml

or

conda env create -f environment.yml

In this second case, later on, whenever you want to launch jupyter, you’ll first need to do:

conda activate python-school

Install other packages (if needed)

You can extend Python by installing several free packages. The best way to do it varies according to the operating system and the installed package manager.

Warning

We will be using system commands. If you see >>> in the command line, it means you are inside Python interpreter and you must first exit: to do it, type exit() and press Enter.

In what follows, to check if everything is working, you can substitute PACKAGENAME with requests which is a module for the web.

If you have Anaconda:

• click on Windows icon in the lower left corner and search Anaconda Prompt. A console should appear where to insert commands, with something written like C:\Users\David>. (NOTE: to run commands in Anaconda, use only this special console. If you use the default Windows console (cmd), Windows, will not be able to find Python)

• In the console type conda install PACKAGENAME

If you have Linux/Mac open the Terminal and give this command (--user install in your home):

python3 -m pip install --user PACKAGENAME

Note

If you receive errors which tell you the command python3 is not found, remove the 3 after python

Note

There is also a system command pip (or pip3 according to your system). You can directl call it with pip install --user PACKAGENAME

Instead, we install instead with commands like python3 -m pip install --user PACKAGENAME for uniformity and to be sure to install packages for Python 3 version